Unofficial news and tips about Google

November 23, 2007

Google News Visualizations

Besides the standard Google News page, there are other ways to explore the news automatically clustered and ranked by Google.

The image version of Google News shows pictures related to the most important news and lets you explore a gallery of images that illustrate a news. This is a great way to find the key elements from a news at a glance, without even reading the text.

Newsmap is a brilliant visualization for the headlines that reflects the importance of a news. Everything is displayed in a single page that is automatically updated. "Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator."

Google News Cloud displays the most important keywords from today's news in a tag cloud. When you hover over a keyword, other related keywords are highlighted.

Google Trends checks how frequently a word was mentioned in the article indexed by Google News. The results are displayed at the bottom of a chart in the "news reference volume" section.

Buzztracker shows the relation between news and locations. Every day you can see the top cities mentioned in the news on a map. There's also an archive that goes back to 2004. Baghdad, Washington, Gaza, New York seem to be the most frequently mentioned cities.

An interesting way to explore the evolution of a person, company, idea or event is to use the timeline view from Google News Archive. Even if most articles require paid subscriptions, the snippets provided by Google are really helpful.

Image visualization is a really useful way of representing data, and I was actually impressed when I saw it on Google News. It's not a new idea, as many other sites have implemented have already implemented it before. It's cool nonetheless that Google is putting more neat features to the News site.

Though newsmap is more colorful, I find newscloud more interesting and useful. It highlights related items and one can quickly get the gist of the likely news item. Secondly, it provides links to the actual news items. Pity that news is limited to US and Brazil.

On something totally different, since I can't find a better place, does archiving reduce the time it takes to load gmail and what are the advantages and disadvantages of archiving.